Author: am

RSA Conference 2018 is approaching fast, and we’re excited to attend that event. Meet our Team in person in the week of the RSA Conference (April, 16th-20th) in San Francisco, CA. Please feel free to complete the form below, including your preferred time to meet: Continue reading →

For a website, trust means business. Symantec SSL Certificates and the Norton Secured Seal displayed with them form the most trusted mark on the Internet. One reason this is true is that to use these assets, an organization must have its identity carefully validated. Now, customers can take advantage of a new feature called Symantec Ready Issuance and get new or renewed Symantec SSL Certificates as much as 288 times faster. CertCenter, a Symantec Website Security Partner, shows how the new feature works.

Why Wait?

Getting Symantec SSL certificates is now faster and easier.

“Customers who ordered or renewed an Organization-Validated SSL certificate used to have to wait at least a day to get it”, says Carsten Müller, CEO at CertCenter, a leading Symantec Website Security Partner. “Now, using Symantec Ready Issuance, customers can get their certificate in 10 minutes – about 288 times faster than before”.

Effective April 1st, 2015, the CA/B Forum is reducing the maximum validity of OV (Organization-Validated) and DV (Domain-Validated) SSL Certificates to 36 months in order to increase SSL/TLS security. Under these guidelines, no CA or their partners should offer OV/DV SSL Certificates with a term of validity greater than 3 years. As of March 9th, 2015, Symantec will only sell OV and DV SSL Certificates with a maximum validity of 3 years. This restriction applies to new certificate issuance as well as renewals. Beginning April 1st, 2015, if you need to reissue your SSL Certificate, the maximum validity allowed will be 36 months.

After transmission of an order for an SSL certificate with Organization Validation (OV), an extensive vetting of the applying organization, the relevant contact, and the domain name, are the main responsibilities of the Certification Authorities (CAs).

It has taken our HR department a couple of months to find the right person for this job opening. We needed someone with the necessary experience and industry know-how to prevent delaying or clogging up the flow of daily processes and tasks. We are happy to announce that we have found our colleague, Mr. Hotze, to be ideally suited for this position. Before he joined us at CertCenter (on March 1st, 2015), Mr. Hotze had worked many years as part of the Symantec Authentication Services Team in Dublin, Ireland.

It is not only organizations with multiple departments and IT specialists that desire flexibility in regards to the entitlements of their users and the availability of extensive auditing – these are almost always required by the compliance-process.

Certificate Transparency (CT) is a Google initiative to log, audit, and monitor certificates that Certificate Authorities (CAs) have issued. A CT’s intent is to prevent CAs from issuing public key certificates for a domain without the domain owner’s knowledge.

Google recently announced that certain SSL Certificates with a lifecycle beyond the 1st of January 2016 are going to be treated as progressively less trustworthy by future versions of Chrome. The SSL Certificates in question are those signed using the slightly dated SHA-1 hashing algorithm. The same is going to apply to SSL Certificates which have been signed using SHA-256, but contain SHA-1 Intermediates within their chain of certificates (Chromium Blog Post, 5th of September 2014).